Peer Review and Wikipedia?

I’ve had a mini-break from the online world and apologize for not having posted in awhile.  Here’s some fascinating news that was brought to my attention by my peer…  RNA Biology is requiring that for articles of a certain track:

(1) substantial updates and reviews of existing RNA families or
(2) novel RNA families based on computational and/or experimental results for which little evolutionary analysis has been published

they must also include a published article in Wikipedia in order to be published.  Talk about Internet and science.  This is definitely a novel approach to peer-review, publication, information seeking behavior, and open access.  Excellent, in my opinion.  Here’s a news story about the whole thing.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081219-journal-requires-peer-reviewed-wikipedia-entry-to-publish.html

IEEE Xplore Adds MeSH Indexing

So, wanna be able to search those IEEE publications using MeSH?  Well, now you can (for some).  Use the U of M proxy for IEEE Xplore and the following publications have MeSH indexing back to 2006:

1. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine
2. IEEE Trans on Bio-medical Engineering
3. IEEE Trans on Image Processing
4. IEEE trans on IT in biomedicine
5. IEEE Trans on Medical Imaging
6. IEEE Trans on Nanobioscience
7. IEEE Trans on Neural Networks
8. IEEE Trans on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
9. IEEE Trans on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Part B – Cybernetics
10. IEEE Trans on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control
11. IEEE/ACM Trans on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
12. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
13. IEEE Trans on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
14. IEEE Trans on Visualization and Computer Graphics
15. The Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS

It’s nice to have our lives simplified sometimes.

NIH’s SHARe-Asthma Resource Project

NIH has created the largest public access collection of clinical asthma and genetic data by expanding their SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource) project to the newly expanded SHARP (SHARe Asthma Resource Project) which includes data on 2,332 with asthma and 805 families whose DNA was tested for 1 million genetic variations. Clinical data was also included in the database. SHARP can be accessed through dbGaP.  Additional information can be found in the NIH news release.

Yeah for open information!

Increased Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Science this week talks about the possibility of increasing the number of embryonic stem cell research lines with the incoming Obama administration.  Read the full story here.

New Books

Taubman Medical Library has the Molecular Biomethods Handbook available.  Contents include chapters on: manipulation of nucleic acids, principles and medical applications of the polymerase chain reaction, denaturing high-perfomance liquid chromatography for nucleic acid analysis, quantification of mRNA using real time RT-PCR, gene/protein sequence analysis compilation of bioinformatic tools and much more.  The call number is QH 506 .M6642 2008.  The editors are John Walker and Ralph Rapley.  Have fun!